Colombia’s Truth Commission is dealing with nearly 60 years of violence, cruelty, human rights violations, etc.

TWO CENTURIES AGO — in 1822 — U.S. President James Monroe UNILATERALLY issued “The Monroe Doctrine,” which asserted the U.S. government’s right to do whatever it wants to any and all nations in Latin America — and threatened war against any European nation that threatened to stop us.

The U.S. has been acting upon that imperialist doctrine — in violation of Latin American people’s yearning for freedom and democracy.  The U.S. has intervened militarily in many Latin American nations, overthrown many democratic governments, installed dictators, funded extremely brutal dictators and death squads, and allowed U.S. business corporations to exploit the people and their environment.  In recent decades “anti-communism” and the “War on Drugs” have been the U.S. government’s convenient excuses for doing that.

For nearly 60 years the U.S. has enabled right-wing governments in Colombia to commit horrible violence as part of this tradition.  In 2016 a peace agreement has been bringing this extreme violence to an end.  Win Without War (www.winwithoutwar.org) posted this next paragraph on July 15, 2022:

Justice and reconciliation are slow and grinding processes, but they are possible. Colombia’s Truth Commission recently released a report detailing the crimes of a nearly six-decade civil conflict in the country, a key outcome of a 2016 peace agreement between the government and FARC. Reckoning with rights violations and naming perpetrators is a key step in stabilizing post-conflict societies, both for the people of those societies themselves and for governments — like the United States — that helped fuel the conflict from afar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About GlenAnderson 1498 Articles
Since the late 1960s Glen Anderson has devoted his life to working as a volunteer for peace, nonviolence, social justice, and progressive political issues. He has worked through many existing organizations and started several. Over the years he has worked especially for such wide-ranging goals as making peace with Vietnam, eliminating nuclear weapons, converting from a military economy to a peacetime economy, abolishing the death penalty, promoting nonviolence at all levels throughout society, and helping people organize and strategize for grassroots movements to solve many kinds of problems. He writes, speaks, and conducts training workshops on a wide variety of topics. Since 1987 he has produced and hosted a one-hour cable TV interview program on many kinds of issues. Since 2017 he has blogged at https://parallaxperspectives.org He lives in Lacey near Olympia WA. You can reach him at (360) 491-9093 glen@parallaxperspectives.org